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Killer Cop Myth?

Here is an interesting read in the Post:

To hear the media tell it, America is in the grip of an unprecedented crime wave, an orgy of wanton murder in which heavily armed thugs randomly gun down innocent unarmed people, some of them teens, just for sport.

Except that these homicidal goons are wearing the blues and badges of American police departments.

It’s the narrative that’s given rise to the protest movement Black Lives Matter and to a growing public mistrust of the police in general. From Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., to the recent shooting of a middle-aged woman and a teen in Chicago, the body count seemingly keeps rising, exacerbating racial tensions and keeping the nation on edge. And each incident is breathlessly reported by a media determined to show that America remains deeply, irredeemably racist.

It is always good to hear the other side of the story. I mean, after all, that’s my job as a a defense attorney! The narrative of cop-on-black violence has often been tilted against cops, so we reports like this one offer a new perspective.

We should not, however, forget that those who decry bad behavior by our police sometimes have a point. And quite frequently they have a point. I can tell you that my own experience with cops hasn’t been uniformly great. And if I as a more or less well off white guy in a business suit can get hassled or ignored by cops in a “good” neighborhood, just imagine what a young black kid in East New York can undergo.